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Obama v. Cognitive Bias

Agent Orange | 06.02.2009 12:11 | Anti-racism | Education | Social Struggles | World

A study was recently published "showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election." Earlier researchers had "assembled university students with identical SAT scores and administered tests to them, discovering that blacks performed significantly poorer when asked at the start to fill out a form identifying themselves by race. The researchers attributed those results to anxiety that caused them to tighten up during exams in which they risked confirming a racial stereotype."

Reviewers of the new study theorized that "Obama’s election could increase the sense of competence among African-Americans, and it could reduce the anxiety associated with taking difficult test questions.”

This reminded me of an earlier study that found that individuals' implict biases shift significantly when they are immersed in situations that provide frequent exposure to admired members of traditionally stigmatized groups (e.g., famous African Americans or older people) and disliked members of traditionally valued groups (e.g.,infamous whites or younger people).

This involved use of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which uses an individual test-taker's response speed to assess the relative strength with which he or she associates certain targets with positive or negative attributes. For example, participants are typically asked to "classify stimuli representing two target concepts (e.g., flowers and insects, or Black and White groups) and evaluative attributes (e.g., good and bad words) using two designated keys. When the IAT is used to measure racial attitudes, people typically respond more quickly and easily if pleasant attributes share the same response key with White racial stimuli and unpleasant attributes share the same key with Black racial stimuli than vice versa."

But the authors found that test-takers whose initial performance indicated a tendency to associate black targets with negative attributes (and a tendency to associate white targets with positive evaluations) displayed significant less implict bias of that sort after repeated exposure to pictures of admired African Americans (e.g., Dr, King) and disliked whites (e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer). Similarly, the authors found that test-takers' automatic preference for younger over older people declined after encountering images of admired older and disliked younger individuals.

Together, these studies make me wonder about the effects we might expect now that pictures of President Obama are prominently displayed throughout the media as well as in government offices throughout the country . . .

Agent Orange

Comments

Hide the following 4 comments

Yes, we can

06.02.2009 12:45

Brilliant article. Negative reinforcement - 'You are a useless bitch and you'll always fail' - does engender failure. It is standard practice to repeat an outrageous lie until it is believed. It is also inaccurate and unprovable, stupid in other words.

The fact the same tests show different results prove this effect, but there is a deeper worry about the tests themselves. These are tests developed by one race to judge all races so they will be biased towards certain types of intelligence that they themselves perform well at.

So there are racial differences in IQ, which sometimes don't get discussed because of past genocides, but also because the idea of 'race' is unscientific. Even by a racist measure of intelligence though IQ is simply a limited form of potential. A person with an IQ of 50 can be, and often are, far smarter than people with an IQ of 150. Anytime you hear someone boasting about their IQ then you can be sure you dealing with an idiot. In extreme cases this is viewed as an illness, like autistsic 'idiot savants' who can perorm unbelievable tasks but can't tie their own shoelaces.


when i was four years old
they tried to test my i.q.
they showed me a picture
of 3 oranges and a pear
they said,
which one is different?
it does not belong
they taught me different is wrong
but when i was 13 years old
i woke up one morning
thighs covered in blood
like a war
like a warning
that i live in a breakable takeable body
an ever increasingly valuable body
that a woman had come in the night to replace me
deface me
see,
my body is borrowed
yeah, i got it on loan
for the time in between my mom and some maggots
i don't need anyone to hold me
i can hold my own
i got highways for stretchmarks
see where i've grown
i sing sometimes
like my life is at stake
'cause you're only as loud
as the noises you make
i'm learning to laugh as hard
as i can listen
'cause silence
is violence
in women and poor people
if more people were screaming then i could relax
but a good brain ain't diddley
if you don't have the facts
we live in a breakable takeable world
an ever available possible world
and we can make music
like we can make do
genius is in a back beat
backseat to nothing if you're dancing
especially something stupid
like i.q.
for every lie i unlearn
i learn something new
i sing sometimes for the war that i fight
'cause every tool is a weapon -
if you hold it right.

ambigram


Stop reposting without citing sources

06.02.2009 17:40

Please cite the AUTHOR and URL of reposted articles using the the Author and Homepage fields.

February 04, 2009
Obama v. Cognitive Bias
posted by Helen Norton
 http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/02/obama_v_cogniti.html

IMC'er


pretty (vacant)

06.02.2009 18:44

-Stop reposting without citing sources

Stop spouting orders like a fascist when you probably aren't. Is this suddenly your personal blog just because you've volunteered a few hours? If not, realise that even basic requests are insults when they are worded are orders.

What you should've written is 'Please don't repeat uncited posts or you may risk getting hidden'.

You're not the boss of me now
And you ain't so big

Via Malcom in the Middle written by They Might Be Giants. They Might Be Giants stole their name without credit, along with every other thing they wrote.

Please is a magical word, it transforms jobs-worth fascists into decent people. There might be a birdhouse in your soul and you shouldn't poison it.

please


What's with the sudden obsession with providing meta data?

09.02.2009 23:46

The only fields that a posted is required to fill in are name, title, abstract and the article itself, all other fields are optional and always have been so why this sudden fascist like obsession from 'IMC Admin' to make everyone comply with their own made up rules?

Indeed, you are not the boss of us!

required


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